Risks of the Fusaka upgrade and validator instability

Concentration of Data in PeerDAS

I see the implementation of PeerDAS as a risk to decentralization. EIP-7594 allows nodes to verify data by checking 12.5% slices of blobs. This is the main mechanism for scaling data availability. The reduction in bandwidth requirement is 80%. However, this mechanism requires nodes to rely on peers to reconstruct the full data. If a small group of infrastructure providers or staking operators holds the full data, the network loses its decentralization. I think the reliance on a concentrated group of full data nodes is a problem. The upgrade includes EIP-7918, which sets a minimum reserve price for data blobs. This ensures that blob fees do not fall below the execution cost for validators. This price floor makes the economics of L2 posting more predictable. The upgrade increases the block gas limit from 36 million to 60 million, which is a 66% increase. I find that the complexity of these interrelated EIPs is a risk. This increase in the block gas limit is 60 million gas, which is a 33% increase in network capacity.

The expansion of data space for rollups is a major goal. PeerDAS provides a theoretical 8x increase in data space for blobs. This increase helps rollups like Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync. These L2 solutions generate millions in fees, but the fees recorded on Ethereum tended to diminish to nearly zero when they posted their data. EIP-7918 changes this by ensuring every L2 transaction contributes to the burning of ETH.

Validator Exit Volatility

The validator exit queue is at a record level of 2.6 million ETH, which is approximately $12 billion. This massive amount of exiting stake raises concerns about the stability of the network. EIP-7922 provides a way to manage this through a dynamic exit queue rate limit. The EIP-7922 proposal adjusts the maximum churn allowed in each generation according to the unused churn from the past 16 generations to reduce validator wait times during periods of high exit demand without sacrificing network safety. I believe this dynamic adjustment is better than a fixed limit. The current protocol uses a fixed limit of 16 exits per epoch. This limit is based on the calculation that 10% of the stake should not exit within one month.

What is the long term impact of this massive exit queue on the ETH price?

The system calculates unused churn by looking at the past 14 generations. The final returned value is capped at eight times the current fixed churn. With 1,053,742 validators, the churn limit is 16 exits per epoch. This means the network can process 3,600 exits per day.

Gas Limits and Transaction Safety

The increase in the block gas limit to 60 million is a major change. EIP-7935 coordinates this increase across client teams like Geth, Nethermind, and Erigon. I see a risk in how this higher limit interacts with existing contract logic. EIP-7825 mitigates this by capping single transaction gas at 16,777,216. This cap is 2 to the power of 24. This limit is meant to prevent a single transaction from dominating a block. EIP-7825 also helps prevent denial-of-service attacks. I would suggest that developers must test their batch operations on the Hoodi testnet. The new limit is 16.7 million gas.

The upgrade also includes EIP-7823 and EIP-7883. These proposals adjust the gas cost model for the MODEXP precompile. EIP-7823 caps the input size to 1024 bytes. EIP-7883 adjusts the gas pricing to better reflect the real cost for validators. These changes are meant to strengthen resilience against denial-of-service attacks. EIP-7934 imposes an upper limit of 10 MiB on the size of RLP-encoded execution blocks. This helps limit network bloat. I find the new gas dynamics are quite complex for developers to manage.

Scaling Through BPO and the Absence of Verkle Trees

The developers omitted Verkle trees from the Fusaka upgrade to ensure the timeline remains stable. This means the network does not yet have the efficiency improvements promised by the Verge phase. The upgrade includes EIP-7892, which introduces Blob Parameter Only forks. These forks allow the network to change blob capacity without a full hard fork. The first BPO fork is on December 17, 2025, and it increases the maximum blob count from 9 to 15. The second BPO fork is on January 7, 2026, and it increases the count to 21. This expansion helps L2s.

The expansion of blob capacity is a priority for the network. Since March 2023, the average use of blobs increased from 0.9 to 5.1 per block. This growth shows the need for the BPO forks. You should monitor your node’s hardware requirements as these capacity increases continue. The implementation of EIP-7917 allows the Beacon Chain to precompute block proposers for the next epoch. This enables based rollups and near-instant transaction preconfirmations. I see the transition to these new models as a major shift for the ecosystem.